Um Rakuba refugee camp
Humanitarian Camps
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedJust over 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan to date, following escalating conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
- How many affectedAffected persons: 96,000 · Displaced persons: 5,000
- What help is neededMost of the refugees in the camp and those crossing into Sudan, many of them women and children, are desperate for food, shelter, clean water, sanitation and health care.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Just over 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan to date, following escalating conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, together with the Sudanese authorities, has moved some 14,000 refugees from Hamdayet and Abderafi border points to Um Rakuba camp, situated some 70 kilometres away from the Ethiopian border. Most of the refugees in the camp and those crossing into Sudan, many of them women and children, are desperate for food, shelter, clean water, sanitation and health care. “The needs are overwhelming. The Hamdayet transit centre which was originally built to house hundreds, now has thousands living there,” said Andrew Mbogori, UNHCR’s Principal Emergency Coordinator in Sudan. “It’s located in such a remote area and it has been challenging to upgrade facilities to minimum standards.” Mbogori adds that there is also a real concern of outbreaks of waterborne diseases and the spread of COVID-19. Like Tsige, Nigsty, was enjoying her life at home as a housewife with her husband, who worked on a farm as a truck driver. But the conflict forced them to leave everything behind. Heavily pregnant at the time, she fell sick during the three-day journey and was increasingly worried about her unborn child. “I was so scared – my stomach was in pain and the situation was very hard. I did not expect to deliver my baby safely,” adds Nigsty, who delivered a baby girl just days after arriving in the camp. Though grateful for finding safety in Sudan, she is worried about her extended family, who are unaware of their whereabouts or that she has delivered the baby. “How will they know? I don’t even know where they are. There is no phone or internet – everything is closed,” she cries. “We are worried about them, we don’t know whether they are alive or not.” In Ethiopia, UNHCR staff and partners in Shire town have already distributed water, high energy biscuits, clothes, mattresses, sleeping mats and blankets to an estimated 5,000 internally displaced Ethiopians. “We lost our plans for the future. Everything we worked for is now gone.” Meanwhile, in Sudan, many refugees say they prefer to remain near the border to wait for family members still in Ethiopia, or in hopes they will be able to return home soon – including farmers, like Tsige, who left their farms behind, which are ripe for harvesting. “This time of year is harvest time. There was millet in the fields and our workers were in the fields,” says Tsige. She is trying to remain hopeful but fears for the future and especially, her children. “We lost our plans for the future. Everything we worked for is now gone,” she cries, adding that since the conflict started, they have not slept. “We had a lot of hope – I educated my children so they can have a better life. I was waiting for my son to graduate from university. But now, our lives have been disrupted.”
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 2 human-impact figures were separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Affected persons
- 96,000 retained at 2020-12-12
- Displaced persons
- 5,000 retained at 2020-12-12
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 d491c1ac62e968ff3bf44303945236f46a6597fb5f201de9dea29c4161fec3ab